Businesses must experiment more and let go of old ways of carrying out their activities, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton (left) warned a 36-company consortium on Friday.

“Businesses need to be agile, not fragile,” she said at the fourth Future of Work (FoW) Research Consortium. The top 15 insights from the research were shared for representatives from the global companies to take back to their organisations.

The consortium looks at how businesses need to evolve to face future global challenges by bridging the gap between academia and business practice.

At the event attended by Recruiter, Gratton said the aim was for representatives to bring these insights into their companies and to create an action plan with short-term and long-term actions.

The insights, which Gratton encouraged the executives to share with their chief executive officers, revolved around future talent, business and society, and organisational agility. The priority areas for future-proofing were around leadership, organisational structure, people and culture and values.

Among the most important challenges was enlightened leadership. Gratton said the days of relying on a CEO to lead a company through a hierarchical approach was over. Leadership needed to be “distributed” and “inspirational”. “[It] wasn’t happening yet but it was emerging,” Gratton said.

New leaders coming in from the outside needed to be onboarded into a company’s culture better, “connecting leaders with values” and leading on to a more shared company structure.

Gratton concluded by saying the “dominant logic” of the old ways of doing business needed to be let go in place of more experimentation. 

Member organisations in FoW 4 include: Accenture, Arla Foods, Barclays, BT Group, Bupa, Cisco, Diageo, John Lewis, KCOM Group, KPMG, ManpowerGroup, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, O2 Telefónica, Oman Oil, Pepsico, PwC, Randstad, RBS, RSA Insurance Group, Save the Children, Shell, Standard Bank, Tata Consultancy Services, Unilever, Vodafone and Volvo.